graffiti in experience

Its that time of year again. No not winter or holidays, I’m talking open enrollment.

It continues to amaze me how awfully cumbersome and complex it is just navigating the health insurnce maze. Let alone going to get care. What with co-payments and co-insurance, deductibles and annual maximums, its a wonder how people know what’s covered. I suppose that’s what healthcare reform is about.

What we need is a plan decoder. Whether its comparing multiple plans at work or freelance gig, or that of a spouse / domestic partner – a single tool that let’s you compare the key factors. And calculate break-even costs, and even do scenario projection.

And it would be great if it would list out the fine print – pre-approvals etc.

As with all of my Why Hasn’t Someone Done This? posts, I do hope someone can prove me wrong and show me that this actually exists somewhere. Or some enterprising person is hacking together a kludge for now.

I shop online, a lot, but one thing that has always bothered me is the inadequacy of filtering options.

Even Amazon, which I treat as the standard-bearer for all things user experience, leaves something to be desired. Take an esoteric search like headphones. I want to be able to filter from my immediate result set by –

• price range (that I define, since I may want to spend $27 – 8$86), that includes shipping calculated – I mean you know who I am after all
• review rating (and I would really like to be able to thumbs up or down a particular set of reviewers so that their ratings are weighted more heavily)
• shipping option, particularly free shipping
• multi-brand selectable, if I want to say choose the top 3 manufacturers
• type (over-the-ear, behind-the-neck, in-ear etc.) and again a multi-select
• feature set (high-frequency monitors, low-range etc.)

… and finally, the ability to check a box per product to add it to a comparison / feature analysis list. Now yes I can already hear some people say that Amazon’s wish list or listmania widget does this – but not quite in the way I’m looking. I want to be able to temporarily compare a few sets of products, but also have my comparison selections (and that of all the other shoppers) be analyzed and data-mined in the way Amazon does so well. Oh and sortable please. Every filter field should also be a sortable field in the results.

This would then drive the next generation of filtering, based on comparison criteria shoppers have defined. I care about this far, far more than which department it’s from. I can’t help that headphones are taxonomized within clothing or musical instruments. Related, perhaps, relevant to my search, not as much.

Now I’m not lambasting Amazon, they’ve got some features down, others retailers/e-tailers have got other things right. Like NewEgg. A hard drive search yields a veritable smogasbord of filter options. But no price self-ranging or reviews. And Staples has a very cool Select Multiple option, though I wish it was the default. And please, no drop-down to select filter options. I don’t want to have to double the number of steps I take.

The holy grail thus far – PriceGrabber – these guys have done an amazing job. What can they improve? Expand all option for the facets, add user reviews to filtering (see note above about reviews), and price range to include shipping estimates. An expanded merchant list would be great, some of those heavy-hitters are not yet included.

Now if I was one of those venerable search engines offering shopping results, these are features I might implement to expedite the user’s shopping experience. Google does a pretty good job, but again multi-select (so I can pick my 3 e-tailers of choice) and factoring in shipping.

As with all of my Why Hasn’t Someone Done This? posts, I do hope someone can prove me wrong and show me that this actually exists somewhere. Or some enterprising person is hacking together a kludge for now.

So the ubiquitous ‘Share This’ is here to stay. Everyone from the big-box to the local mom & pop stores are now using it. It’s great, love the concept – if you like it and you know me and think I’d like it, you tell me about it.

Someone sends me something, I check it, it’s cool. That’s all dandy. Then another friend sends it. And another, and another. I get it, it’s a great thing, but how do I stop the barrage.

What is needed is a ‘Don’t Share’ feature to accompany a site, tool or app. Once you’ve seen it, and you know all there possibly is to know about it, you click it and are never to be bothered again. No matter how cool everyone else thinks it is.

Concerned about privacy, it really doesn’t compromise your privacy any more than those friends who share things with you. The marketers get your email address anyway, why not make it work for you.

As with all of my Why Hasn’t Someone Done This? posts, I do hope someone can prove me wrong and show me that this actually exists somewhere. Or some enterprising person is hacking together a kludge for now.

So I’ve wondered for a while now, iPhone has accelerometer, so does Wii controller.

Closest it seems like it has come is this cool video of a WiiMote updating iphone built on open-source bluetooth stack extender. Or perhaps this iFun app that let’s you play PC games. Or this one.

Cool as those are, not so functional when you’re having a party, 2 people are going at it on your only 2 controllers. Meanwhile everyone’s got an iPhone and a serious jonesing for a Super Mario Bros show-down.

Why aren’t Nintendo/Apple partnering for some exclusive deal on a Wii controller app. Apple gets to tap into the Wii games share (admittedly not quite so huge) and Nintendo gets a controller in everyone’s packets. Mobile avatars and potential customers abound.

As with all of my Why Hasn’t Someone Done This? posts, I do hope someone can prove me wrong and show me that this actually exists somewhere. Or some enterprising person is hacking together a kludge for now.

He came up with Mailinator which is conceptually simple yet absolutely brilliant at what it does.

The gist – you go to some random site, they force you to register (sometime later I’ll talk about why I don’t think this is a good idea). Dang, which free email account do I use for spam again. Well never again. You just sign-up with anything@mailinator.com. No pre-registering with Mailinator, no passwords, nothing. Then pop over to mailinator.com, type in your created name – and BAM! – you’ve got that ebook, or software or whatever it is someone decided filling their CRM database with spam was woth doing.

Now some site may block it, like say Facebook but there nifty ways around it. (You would think they learned their lesson with the bugmenot incident)

Oh and he’s running this on a computer in his bedroom. Ok not quite, but it is still a very elegant and light setup.

So I say to you Paul, bravo. If only my college roommate’s late night rantings could be so profound and so technologically efficiently executed. You’ve made the world a better place.

What started out as a pipe-dream lo so many moons ago is finally a reality. Life and work just have a habit of getting in the way of these things.

In any case, I aim to one-stop-shop manage my socio-sphere, with as much automation across platforms and APIs as can be. I will use open source and free tools where possible to facilitate this, and will look to augment as new technologies emerge.

I am also a tech-geek at heart. If it’s new, I want it. I want to try it. I want to buy it. I want to play with it. I’ve had the luxury of so many great consumer (generally) electronic devices out there, I want to share my findings in hopes that it may help someone, somewhere navigate the maze.

And sometimes its just wishing really cool things existed. Like a standardized way to taxonomize and facet-filter products. E.g., am getting a Kindle, (more on that later) and was looking for a great cover. Something without the hinge (horror stories on cracked devices – ugh), something that was book-like, not a sleeve, and finally something with more than just 4 elastic straps holding it down.

Settled on this one. Not that it doesn’t look like an awesome product. Meets all my requirements. But I spent the better part of Saturday hunting for this. And really only found this.

So I hope to bring light to needs, shine the light on products and people that have met those needs, and just kvetch about anything and everything I deem worthy.

I’ll look forward to hearing about things I didn’t know existed and solutions to problems I have.